Mirroring CPAN in your laptop

For some years now, I always have a full CPAN mirror on my laptop. I work a lot offline and I like to have it around.

Until today I did a full rsync from a public mirror from my ISP, but Nuno sent me a script to mirror only the latest versions of each module but I never got around to use it.

But I noticed that the script he sent me is now (well, I noticed it today…) on CPAN itself, so I just did:

$ sudo bash
# cpan CPAN::Mini
# cd /sw
# mv cpan cpan.full
# mkdir cpan
# minicpan -l /sw/cpan/ -r file://sw/cpan.full/ 
# du -hs cpan cpan.full
409M    cpan
3.2G    cpan.full

hmms… 1.8Gb free space… nice… I keep it up-to-date with minicpan -l /sw/cpan/ -r ftp://ftp.ip.pt/pub/perl/.